Highlights from the Archives

When Paul Gauguin sailed from Marseille for Tahiti on April 1, 1891, he was confident of finding a terrestrial paradise with natives living in sensual harmony with nature and ancient deities. But the reality was painfully different. In the 19th century, traditional Tahitian culture had gradually been smothered by Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries and by French colonial administrators. Dismayed, Gauguin devoted the next 12 years to recreating in paintings, sculptures and engravings this paradise lost -- in his mind, an idyllic world of naked maidens, lush landscapes and strange spirits.

Gauguin developed fast. The still-learning, largely self-taught painter of a Cézannesque still life in 1883 was, half a dozen years later, a highly individualistic artist. By then, he had claimed art as his destiny, separated from his family and begun to immerse himself in exotic environments.

Paul Gauguin is a magnetic artist, not least because of his well-known life story -- or at least the outlines of that story. Gauguin was dedicated to nothing less than rejecting western civilization, and he proved it by giving up his conventional bourgeois life to go to the South Seas.

Like his friend and colleague Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin has suffered the fate of the artist who achieves enormous posthumous fame in our celebrity-conscious age: even as his paintings have skyrocketed in value, his life has been mythologized, reduced to a flimsy caricature of bohemian rebellion.

Who but Gauguin pioneered our century's faith in so-called primitive art as an energizing and liberating force? Who but he set color free, once and for all, from the drudgery of description? Who but he pioneered the notion of the line whose every direction has a different emotional significance?

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February 6, 2015, Friday

A new pas de deux by Benjamin Millepied in Paris; a range of exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and a staging of Björk’s “Medulla” in Brussels are in this week’s lineup of international art events.